Group items tagged

The Environmental Appeals Board blocked the EPA from issuing a permit to a proposed coal plant addition near Vernal, Utah, about 150 miles east of Salt Lake City. Perhaps more importantly, the quasi-independent board, composed of four highly regarded, experienced judges, ruled that the EPA needs to develop a single nationwide standard for dealing with carbon dioxide.

SearchMonkey reuses structured data to improve search result display with benefits to both search users, developers, and publishers of web content.

LT4eL (Language Technology for e-Learning) develops a framework of multilingual language technology tools and semantic web techniques for improving the retrieval and the metadata annotation of learning material.

SMILA is an extensible framework for building search solutions to access unstructured information in the enterprise. Besides providing essential infrastructure components and services, SMILA also delivers ready-to-use add-on components, like connectors to most relevant data sources. Using the framework as their basis will enable developers to concentrate on the creation of higher value solutions, like semantic driven applications etc.

The focus of this month's issue moves from the individual to the community. Sustainable development requires communities in which people consciously and continuously attempt to balance individual self-interest with the common good. Surely, this is not the kind of ethos that induced the current financial crisis that, starting in New York, has already spread to all regions of the world. It is a financial pandemic, fueled by a greed virus that makes governments willing to sink trillions of dollars into failed financial institutions at the expense of millions of human beings that lack the resources to meet the most basic human needs.

The Yahoo! BOSS API allows you to access the Yahoo! search index with new levels of freedom. You can rearrange the results, change their look, have unlimited requests, mash the results with other resources, and you don't even have to let people know that Yahoo! is powering the page. Many people are busy mashing the BOSS results with internal data sets, proprietary logic, and new visual interfaces.

The global spread of the H5N1 avian influenza has already extensively damaged economies worldwide and food security in developing countries. The spread of infection to new ecosystems results in viral adaptation to new hosts, including humans, which inevitably amplifies the potential for pandemic flu. H5N1 represents an unprecedented model of how influenza infections may become widespread. It is recognized that avian influenza viruses may be the progenitors of the next human pandemic virus, and for this reason their genetic evolution should be monitored and investigated in a timely manner. The full support of the international scientific community is therefore urgently required to better understand the spread and evolution of the virus, and the determinants of its transmissibility and pathogenicity in humans. This in turn demands that scientists with different fields of expertise have full access to comprehensive genetic sequence, clinical, and epidemiological data from both animal and human virus isolates.

"Cobalt" is an open source virtual world browser and construction toolkit application being developed at Duke University. Cobalt will make it possible for people to easily create, publish, access, and participate in a network of linked virtual worlds. Currently in pre-alpha and built using the Croquet open source software platform, Cobalt uses peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers and makes it very simple to create and share secure virtual worlds that run on all major software operating systems.

A new model of evolution's origins traces the possible outlines of a critical and mysterious stage in Earth's infancy, when a few odd chemicals developed into the molecular ancestors of life as we know it.

This paper presents two design patterns for the hypermedia domain: `Navigational Contexts' and `Information on Demand'. They are applied in two different aspects of hypermedia applications design: the design of healthy navigational structures and the design of understandable and usable hypermedia interfaces, respectively. These two patterns are part of an effort for developing a Pattern Language for that domain.

This is a sub-project of the BioMoby project. It aims to develop tools in Java in order: * to access BioMoby registries, allowing all features provided by such registries, including but not limited to registering and deregistering of the BioMoby services and their parts, discovering them, and understanding their data in various formats (such as RDF), * to create Java implementations of BioMoby services, especially to help service providers with creating BioMoby data containers (input and output data) without exposing providers to the complexity of the XML required and produced by BioMoby services, and finally

Theory Garden™ Seed™ is the brainchild of Professor Richard J. Boland, Jr. and Dr. Tanvir Y. Goraya. It grows from research funded from by the National Science Foundation Program on Coordination Theory and Collaborative Technology. That award was supplemented by a grant from Digital Equipment Corporation and resulted in the development of a software tool named Spider. Publications describing the Spider project are listed below.

Immersive realism may be the "Holy Grail" of game development, but should it be? In this opinion piece, author and designer Lewis Pulsipher argues that most players don't want "role-fulfillment," in support of the idea that strong mechanics -- and even player design awareness -- is a more suitable goal.

Biophysical economics is characterized by a wide range of analysts from diverse fields who use basic ecological and thermodynamic principles to analyze the economic process. The history of biophysical thought is traced from the 18th-century Physiocrats to current empirical research, with emphasis on those individuals who contributed to the development of biophysical economic theory. Attention is also given to a critique of the neoclassical theory of natural resources from a biophysical perspective, and how recent empirical biophysical research highlights areas of neoclassical theory which could be improved by a more realistic and systematic treatment of natural resources.

The OntologyDesignPatterns.org is a semantic web portal dedicated to ontology design patterns (OPs) for the Semantic Web developed in the context of the Neon project (http://www.neon-project.org).

Social Enterprise Innovation Network members help each other get to the next level of impact faster and more effectively thanks to accelerated knowledge discovery, rapid skill development, and new partnership opportunities.

An unbook is more like software: 1. An unbook is never finished, but rather continually updated, based on feedback from users andtheir evolving needs. 2. An unbook is released in versions. As in open source software, version 1.0 of an unbook is a significant milestone, indicating that it is stable and reliable enough for use by the general public. The significance of a new release is indicated by the size of the gap: For example, the difference between 1.1 and 1.1.3 is minor, while the difference between 1.1 and 2.0 is major. 3. An unbook is supported by a community of users who share their experiences and best practices with each other, and help each other troubleshoot problems encountered in their practice areas. An unbook's community is a very real part of the unbook's development team. An unbook is mindware: software for the mind.

Topaz is a nonprofit organization of focused on developing open source software around collaborative creation, management and sharing of information.

The confluence of computers, communications, and databases is quickly creating a distributed database where many applications require real-time access to both temporally accurate and multimedia data. This is particularly true in military and intelligence applications, but these required features are needed in many commercial applications as well. We are developing a distributed database, called BeeHive, which could offer features along different types of requirements: real-time, fault-tolerance, security, and quality-of service for audio and video. Support of these features and potential trade-offs between them could provide a significant improvement in performance and functionality over current distributed database and object management systems. In this paper, we present a high level design for BeeHive architecture and sketch the design of the BeeHive Object Model (BOM) which extends object-oriented data models by incorporating time and other features into objects, resulting in a highly reflective architecture.

there is a different way of thinking about this problem that takes advantage of exciting new developments in molecular biology, evolutionary developmental biology, morphology, neurobiology, and linguistics. In a nutshell, for the first time we have a science that enables us to understand the actual, the possible and the unimaginable, a landscape that will forever change our understanding of what it means to be human, including how we arrived at our current point in evolutionary theory, and where might end up in ten or ten million years.